From IMDb: “An adaptation of the fairy tale about a monstrous-looking prince and a young woman who fall in love.”

First off: I haven’t blogged for a long while due to a number of reasons. The primary reason being that our internet broke at home for two weeks and as a result I ate up all the data on my phone and so was unable to post anything. Which sucked. But anyway, I’m back now 🙂

This review has also taken me a while to write. I read this review on Oh! That Film Blog just after the movie came out, and everything she said was pretty much my thoughts on this movie.

Honestly? My thoughts on this live action adaption are mixed. I don’t know if the fact that my husband and I watched the animated version just a few days before seeing it in the cinema affected the whole experience, but for a film i had pretty high expectations for, it kind of fell a little flat.

Emma Watson was just fine; I have nothing else really to comment on her performance. The autotuning definitely did a lot for her singing parts though – you can hear it very clearly whenever Emma sings. Also, there seemed to be a dodgy array of accents going on … I’m not sure why they decided to give Mrs. Potts a strange Cockney accent, but it ruined the magic of “Tale as Old as Time” in my opinion. Angela Lansbury definitely carried that song a lot better than Emma Thompson (which pains me to say because I adore Emma Thompson). Ewan McGregor’s French accent as Lumiere also left a lot to be desired. Dan Stevens was also fine, despite spending much of the movie behind CGI effects. All I really have to say on many cast performances is that they were fine.

I’m unsure how I feel about the additional musical numbers. The Beast has a solo that just made me think about Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and his “Out There” number … the routine and the songs were just so similar …. It could just have been unfamiliarity in with the familiar, but they felt out of place in such a well known movie.

The hype leading up to this adaptation was huge, and I think expectations were a little bit too high really. Visually, it was stunning, but some of the characters lost their charm between the animated and live action versions as the CGI department tried to make them look more real.

Despite all these negative opinions I’m throwing out there … I absolutely adored Gaston and LeFou! They provided so much humour into the movie, and the “Gaston” song was definitely my favourite part of the film. I know Gaston is a misogynistic bastard but I would absolutely have watched a comedy movie centred around those pair; their character performances were the highlight of the movie for me.

I think a lot of Gaston and LeFou’s wit and comedy comes from the fab writing of Stephen Chbosky who wrote the screenplay. This man wrote one of my favourite books ever, and wrote and directed the wonderful film adaptation of that book. His screenplay was pretty good, I just feel the direction of the piece may have let it down slightly.

This is technically the fourth live action adaptation Disney have done of any of their animated classics, rolling from “101 Dalmatians”, “Cinderella” and then “The Jungle Book”. Unfortunately this movie for me was not up to the standards given to us by “The Jungle Book” which absolutely surpassed itself. I’d say it’s probably on a par with “Cinderella”, which is one of my less favourite Disney adaptations. I’m not saying it’s a bad movie; it just didn’t meet my expectations 🙁